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If it’s March, it must be time for March Madness, the annual college basketball lollapalooza that compels untold millions of people across the country to try and predict the outcome of a 64-team tournament (not including play-in games) in hopes of winning the office or online pool and all the glory and money that goes with it. The beauty (and perhaps irony) of March Madness is that no one – not the college basketball junkie, not the office nerd, not even the analytics guru well-versed in predictive analytics who studies “bracketology” (all three may be the same person) – knows the outcome in advance, so anyone has an equal chance of winning . . . or do they?

As the editor of Analytics magazine (as well as OR/MS Today, the membership magazine of INFORMS), we naturally sing the praises of the analytics profession, and tend to take it for granted that the world understands and appreciates all that analytics offers. And then along comes Charles Barkley, a basketball Hall of Famer now doing commentary for TBS in conjunction with telecasts of NBA games, to shake us out of our complacency.

I enjoy maturity and evolution models of all kinds, especially for business. As the name implies, maturity models for information technologies or management accounting practices, for example, have stages of development that provide confidence that regardless of the model’s current stage – low or high – there is always a next step up that can be attained in an evolutionary way.

The final leg of horse racing’s prestigious Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes, was held this past Saturday. The favored horse, I’ll Have Another, was scratched due to a leg injury. For gamblers who would likely to have bet on I’ll Have Another for the Belmont, maybe this saved them some money. Why? I will get to that in a moment.

I was just reading an article on the INFORMS Analytics section, intriguingly titled Analytics, OR and INFORMS – Where the three meet. I am responsible for the Analytics department of a growing digital marketing agency and I have a long career in Operations Research behind me, so the question “What is analytics and how does it relate to Operations Research?“ I wrestle with.

Because of its direct response and data rich nature, paid search is arguably the most analytic of digital marketing activities. If you go to Google, Bing, or other search engine and type in a search query your browser will return a new page: the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Generally on the left hand side you will see the results that the engine (that’s how the Technorati refer to Search Engines) regards as the most relevant.

Every day I come to work in digital marketing I find everything has been overturned and needs to be radically rethought. It’s a blast. I made the jump from offline in 2000. I already had a 15-year analytics career behind me but there was very little tolerance for my ignorance.

In a recent posting on The New Yorker website, author John Seabrook comments on crowd disasters, noting a difference between such disasters in the developed and developing worlds. In the developed world, they usually occur at big sales events (such as the 2008 Black Friday incident at a Long Island, N.Y., Wal-Mart where an employee was trampled to death), rock concerts, nightclubs and sporting events (i.e., commercial events).

Led by House Speaker John Boehner, many Republicans and other critics of last year’s health care reform legislation describe it as a “job-killer bill” that will eliminate between 650,000 and 1.6 million jobs and waste multi-millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

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While many potential voters dread campaign season because of pervasive negative political advertising, a new study has found that negative political advertising actually works, but perhaps not in the way that many may assume. The study “A Border Strategy Analysis of Ad Source and Message Tone in Senatorial Campaigns,” which will be published in the June edition of INFORMS’ journal Marketing Science, is co-authored by Yanwen Wang of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Michael Lewis of Emory University in Atlanta and David A. Schweidel of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Read more →

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory on June 8 unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer. With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second – or 200 petaflops – Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Read more →

Employee engagement has surfaced as a major concern in delivering improvements in customer experience (CX), with 86 percent of CX executives in a Gartner, Inc. survey ranking it as having an equal or greater impact than other factors such as project management and data skills. “CX is a people issue,” says Olive Huang, research vice president at Gartner. “In some instances, the best technology investments have been derailed by employee factors, such as a lack of training or incentives, low morale or commitment, and poor communication of goals." Read more →